lseltzer - Slashdot User

Submission + - TV Emergency Alert System in Montana Hacked (darkreading.com)

Submitted by

lseltzer

on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @09:41AM

lseltzer writes: "An anonymous attacker hijacked the Emergency Alert System of a TV station in Great Falls, Montana, and broadcast false warning of the dead rising from their graves to attack the living."

Submission + - When is a tablet not a tablet? (amazon.com)

Submitted by bob_jordan on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @08:53AM

bob_jordan writes: Sony have released an all in one 20" touch screen desktop with an interesting feature. It has a battery and can (if your wrists are strong enough) be used as a 20" tablet computer. Albeit a 5kg tablet computer. Will there be much of a market for a 20" tablet PC?

Submission + - Email Domain Protection Effort Gains Traction (darkreading.com)

Submitted by

CowboyRobot

on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @04:03AM

CowboyRobot writes: "An industry effort to protect corporate brands from email domain spoofing has been adopted by Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, as well as major Russian and Chinese email providers in the past year, bringing the trusted email standard Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) to 60 percent of email users worldwide and 80 percent of U.S. consumers. Facebook messaging engineer Michael Adkins says large and small domains from various vertical markets are adopting DMARC. "I've been working on email-related abuse issues for close to 10 years now. The standards, [such as] DKIM, sort of sit there and nothing happens," Adkins says. "But with DMARC, this is the end of a very long road for a lot of people in the industry. We're finally seeing everything click into place""

Comment It's "Samsung," not "Android" (Score 1) 229

by lseltzer on Thursday January 24, 2013 @04:43PM (#42683591) Attached to: Samsung Amps Up Its Multi-Window Android Upgrade

Nobody uses the term "Android" when pitching to consumers, but Samsung is particularly aggressive about differentiating their software. If all the distributions competed only on hardware it would be a boring market.

Submission + - Samsung Adds Multi Windows Mojo to Android Tablets (informationweek.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Thursday January 24, 2013 @02:57PM

__aajbyc7391 writes: New multiwindow, multitasking features in Samsung's recent Jellybean update to the Galaxy Note 10.1 have pushed the user interface of Android tablets into new territory, adding MS Windows-like capabilities that are sure to delight many users — and aggravate others. Although some observers have warned of the dangers of forking Android, Samsung's efforts to extend Android and its ecosystem can be defended as being consistent with Google's master plan for the Android system, most of which is released under ASLv2. And remember: unlike Apple, Android device makers, and the wireless carriers who offer Android smartphones to their customers, need ways to differentiate their products.

Submission + - Twitter's Vine App Ready to Bomb Internet with GIF-Like Videos (slashdot.org)

Submitted by

Nerval's Lobster

on Thursday January 24, 2013 @02:34PM

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Twitter has rolled out Vine, a free app for iOS devices that allows users to shoot and post short videos. Twitter’s strategic focus on brevity—the company has long resisted calls to lengthen Tweets beyond the current 140-character limit—extends to Vine videos, which can only be six seconds in length. “Posts on Vine are about abbreviation—the shortened form of something larger,” Dom Hoffman, Vine’s co-founder and general manager, wrote in a blog posting. “They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.” It’s easy to see the Vine acquisition as part of Twitter’s larger push into multimedia. The company launched a muscled-up photo service Dec. 10, complete with Instagram-style filters and editing tools. That photo launch came on the heels of an escalating battle with Instagram, the Facebook subsidiary, which decided to disable photo integration with Twitter; that same month, Yahoo also decided to jump into the fray with a new Flickr app for iPhone, complete with special filters and the ability to post images to various social networks."

Submission + - Symbian officially dead. (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by Snirt on Thursday January 24, 2013 @02:12PM

Snirt writes: Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company’s earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: “During our transition to Windows
Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,” the company wrote. “The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the
last Symbian device from
Nokia."

Submission + - A close look at how Oracle installs deceptive software with Java updates | ZDNet (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2013 @09:28AM

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's Java plugin for browsers is a notoriously insecure product. Over the past 18 months, the company has released 11 updates, six of them containing critical security fixes. With each update, Java actively tries to install unwanted software. Here's what it does, and why it has to stop.

Submission + - Intel to exit motherboard business after Haswell (extremetech.com)

Submitted by massivepanic on Tuesday January 22, 2013 @08:48PM

massivepanic writes: After 20 years, we’ve learned that Intel plans to exit the motherboard business. This announcement won’t impact Haswell — Intel motherboards will be available in normal volumes and quantities for the fourth generation Core i7 products. After that, Chipzilla will rely on boards from third parties like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI. If you like Intel’s own motherboards, there’s no reason to avoid buying one for Haswell; Intel has confirmed that the next-generation boards will carry the same warranty and support for BIOS updates as previous hardware. On the manufacturing side, however, this announcement could shake up the entire motherboard business.

Comment Re:I feel like the security guard in Austin Powers (Score 1) 492

by lseltzer on Tuesday January 22, 2013 @05:18PM (#42661289) Attached to: You've Got 25 Years Until UNIX Time Overflows

RTFA The story was run on that day because it was exactly 25 years to the event.

Submission + - Attack of the Telepresence Robots! (informationweek.com) 1

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Friday January 11, 2013 @03:01PM

__aajbyc7391 writes: A handful of innovative high-tech startups have recently emerged to create a new market: remote telepresence robots. With one of these robotic Avatars, you can wander around in the remote environment, chatting with coworkers and managers, attending meetings, and solving problems encountered through those interactions. InformationWeek's Telepresence Robot Smackdown compares five such bots — the MantaroBot TeleMe, VGo Communications VGo, Anybots QB, Suitable Technologies Beam, and Revolve Robotics Kubi — and includes short videos demonstrating each. As the article concludes, 'bear in mind that what we're witnessing here is the emergence of a new industry; and if Moore's Law applies here as it does to so many IT spheres, it won't be long before these gadgets are inexpensive, commonplace, and far more flexible and intelligent. Let's just hope they don't get too smart and decide to take over!'

Comment What's the point? (Score 1) 101

by lseltzer on Friday January 11, 2013 @01:15AM (#42554915) Attached to: Windows RT Jailbreak Tool Released

I really don't see the point of jailbreaking this device. There is no native Windows software that will run on it because that's all x86 code. You could run .NET code (at least some, we don't know if the full .NET is in there). And while it's possible to write native Windows programs for ARM, who's really going to do that for the few systems that are jailbroken? BTW, there is no simple jailbreak procedure to invoke this. It's complicated.

Submission + - Should Microsoft Switch to WebKit? (informationweek.com) 1

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Thursday January 10, 2013 @03:19PM

__aajbyc7391 writes: Although IE remains the dominant browser on desktops, it's being trounced on tablets and smartphones by browsers based on WebKit, including Safari, the Android Browser, and Google Chrome. Faced with this uphill battle on handheld mobile devices, Microsoft MVP Bill Reiss has suggested that it might be time for Microsoft to throw in the towel on Trident and switch to WebKit. But although there are lots of points in favor of doing so, there are also some good reasons not to, including security and a need for healthy competition to avoid having mobile developers begin to target WebKit rather than standards. What do Slashdot readers think?

Submission + - Point to Point Encrypted Phone Calls with Off the Shelf Phones (tinyhardwarefirewall.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10, 2013 @03:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: Well, if you would like near total privacy in your voice communications check out this blog post at TinyHardwareFirewall. They combine two bits of hardware, each the size of a deck of cards with a regular phone and presto, AES 256bit encrypted phone calls with no per minute charges to anywhere in the world.

Comment in a slow and complicated way (Score 1) 80

by lseltzer on Saturday December 15, 2012 @09:46AM (#42300831) Attached to: The State of In-Flight Wi-Fi

The article goes into this some. It's not GoGo who's switching to direct satellite operation, but ViaSat which (as far as we know) will only be on JetBlue, some time in 2013. Ironically, what got us doing this article was when one of us was flying on Virgin and the charge was $24.95 instead of the advertised $14.95. It turned out that this was one of the planes with the upgraded GoGo hardware and Virgin was charging more for Wi-Fi on those flights. This led to an internal "WTF is going on here?" memo and this story, which we hope to keep updated.

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